Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) ripped into the Department of Justice and FBI for the FISA application abuses that were done during Crossfire Hurricane, which was an investigation into alleged links between then-candidate Donald Trump's campaign with Russian agents.
Former Acting Attorney General Sally Yates testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday that she would not have signed off on the FISA applications if she had known they did not meet the required standards.
"I seem to detect a pattern here. Ms. Yates, she testifies she had no idea what her deputy was doing as he facilitates contact between political party opposition research and the FBI. She has no idea that these applications that signed materially mislead a federal court, just as [Rod] Rosenstein said he had no idea. Nobody appears to know anything in this government and yet somehow a federal court was deliberately and systemically misled so severely that they now say they can’t trust anything the FBI did. If this does not call for a cleaning of house at DOJ and the FBI, I don’t know what is," Hawley said.
Prior to taking a five-minute break after Hawley had finished with his time, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) voiced her opposition to his comments, saying they were "inflammatory." Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said he agreed with Hawley's remarks.
"With all due respect, we have a deliberate and systematic misleading of a federal court here. I don’t think you can say anything more inflammatory than what the federal court itself said when they issued an incredible statement, I've never seen a federal, let alone a FISA court issue, saying that they now had no confidence in any of the submissions of the FBI based on the level of lying," Hawley replied.
